Does Power Make You Less Moral?

You might not expect a website named Cracked.com to provide
lucid commentary on scientific research of human behavior, but Cracked's
Kathy Benjamin does just that
in an interesting (and photo-heavy) essay. Benjamin argues, citing a
number of scientific studies, that power has a warping effect on the
psychology of those who wield it. Becoming more powerful, according to
Benjamin's article, makes you also become less moral.

Benjamin
cites five behavior-changing affects associated with power, each backed
up with a scientific study or two. But probably the two most compelling
are indifference to others and dishonesty.

Power Makes You Care Less About People Benjamin cites a study, reported in the journal Psychological Science,
in which "the researchers actually surveyed subjects about how powerful
they felt in their own lives. Then they were divided into powerful and
powerless based on their answers. The subjects were then paired up, and
one was told to relay an emotionally scarring event that had happened to
him. The listener was hooked up to an ECG machine, and all of his
stress responses were measured. ... The powerless people reacted the way
you'd expect people would react when told a heart-wrenching tale. The
powerful, on the other hand, felt nothing. ... This seems to indicate
what we had always suspected -- that while politicians may pander to you
by kissing your baby, they might as well be kissing a can of Beanee
Weenees. The guy who stole your wallet at the laundromat will probably
remember your name longer than they will."

Power Makes You Less Honest This time, Benjamin finds a study from the Columbia Business School, which set up a "role playing" experiment to test how power affected honesty and greed.

[The
experiment] divided subjects into leaders and subordinates. Leaders
were even given a fancy, large office; the underlings got a small,
windowless room. All of them were then tempted to lie (they found a $100
bill and were put in a situation where they'd have to lie about it to
the people running the experiment if they wanted to keep it).

After
a nice round of vigorous lying, both groups of subjects were tested for
stress hormone levels. Researchers also studied a video-tape of the
subjects lying their asses off. The result, in their words:

"Low-power
individuals showed the expected emotional, cognitive, physiological,
and behavioral signs of deception; in contrast, powerful people
demonstrated no evidence of lying across emotion, cognition, physiology,
or behavior."

Once more, that's after a couple of hours of completely fake power.
These people were chosen at random, but when they were stuffed into a
fancy room that made them feel like big-shots, their feelings of guilt
about lying melted away.